The Biennial of the Americas Turns Denver Into a Giant Art Fair

In 2010, Denver’s Biennial of the Americas, the brainchild of then-mayor John Hickenlooper (now Colorado’s governor), launched with the lofty goal to “facilitate the development of a unified vision for the future of the Americas.” Tomorrow, the sophomore effort kicks off. Carson Chan, one of four curators, is no stranger to art biennials in unexpected places: the Berlin resident, who was born in Hong Kong and raised in Canada, was behind the successful resurrection of last year’s Marrakech Biennale. For Denver, the 33-year-old decided to take the art out of the museum and into the streets. Under the title “Draft Urbanism,” 30 artists are turning downtown Denver into a two-month-long outdoor exhibition that will include artwork on billboards and public signage by Julieta Aranda, James Franco, Cyprien Gaillard, Liam Gillick, Laurel Nakadate, Jeremy Shaw, Isabella Rozendaal and more. The show will also include large-scale urban installations by four different architecture studios. Shortly before the opening, Chan discussed the peculiarities of Colorado’s capital and why this may be the first biennial with its own beer.

Anthony CameraCarson Chan, one of the four curators of Denver’s Biennial of the Americas, reveals his show on Tuesday.

Q.

Why Denver?

A.

Historically, the biennial phenomenon is a very European thing. By bringing it to Denver, you can really invent it to be whatever you want. The Biennial’s ambition is to create a cultural event in which the Americas can converge and ask whether there is such a thing as a pan-American cultural thread, from Canada all the way down to Chile and everywhere in between. Denver is an optimal host city in many ways. Not only is it almost in the center of the United States — halfway between East Coast and West Coast — but it also has all the ingredients to be a major cultural capital: world class concert halls, fantastic museums, and there is an active art community here.

In 2010, for the first edition, the show was limited to the exhibition spaces in the historic McNichols Building. Why did you choose to disperse the biennial throughout the city this time?

Something I learned from curating the Marrakech Biennale last year is that by showing art in public spaces, you can develop a much larger audience than you would by showing art in a museum or a gallery. By showing art in public spaces you attract new viewers and engage new people. The exhibition is essentially an art and architecture exhibition throughout downtown Denver whose goal is to transform the city into one giant exhibition by repurposing ad spaces like billboards, poster spaces, bus shelters and public LED screens as spaces for art. We’ve also invited architects to design large-scale public installations that respond to key urban issues in downtown Denver. Architecture firm June14 Meyer-Grohbrügge&Chermayeff designed butterfly enclosures on the 16th Street pedestrian mall. By introducing a new species to an existing urban ecology, they aim to call out the unarticulated tensions between downtown’s various subcultures.

One of the themes of the exhibition is “beer.” Explain.

The “draft” in “Draft Urbanism” refers to urbanism as something always in the state of becoming and yes, as well as to beer. Beer is so integrally tied to the identity of Colorado and to its economy. The state has more craft breweries per capita than anywhere in the world, and the way people understand beer here is the way many others would understand wine; there is a very high regard for beer and its production. More importantly, Denver’s urban development is intimately tied to the city’s bars and taverns. Denver started as a mining town in 1858 and immediately, the first institutions that emerged after the mines were the bars. So urbanism, and everything that followed afterwards — politics, economy, culture — is integrally connected to that beginning. The exhibition tries to see beer not simply as a beverage but as something that is part of a larger material system. Let’s not forget that Colorado’s governor John Hickenlooper, Denver’s former mayor, was himself a successful bar owner!

Is it true that you even created a special Biennial beer?

Yes, the Denver Beer Company is brewing a new beer just for the Biennial. We see them as participants in the exhibition, and the beer as another work. It contains Maya nuts from Nicaragua, which gives it a chocolatey taste, barley from Canada, hops from Colorado and so on. The idea is that the beer itself starts to map out the Americas in its own way, through taste.